Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Closing the Achievement Gap through Vocabulary Building

Schools all around the country are faced with the immensity of the achievement gap. Shrinking, and eventually eliminating, the achievement gap is crucial for socioeconomic, racial, and other groups affected. San Diego Unified School District is taking a stab at closing the achievement gap through a new approach at vocabulary building. While traditionally students would look up a word in the dictionary if they didn’t know the meaning, about two dozen schools in San Diego Unified are teaching students how to use their everyday knowledge to find the meanings of words they don’t know. In the real world there isn't always a dictionary on hand. The hope is that students will be able to retain meanings and learn new meanings for themselves without depending on
external resources.